The Future of Social Customer Relationship Management

Currently there’s a lot of buzz around social customer relationship management (CRM). Social media platforms and technologies like Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare are transforming how companies market their products and engage audiences. But when you’re also concerned about delivering results to your clients, you’ll do well to study the evolution from traditional CRM to sCRM.

Like different forms of intelligence – abstract, practical, emotional – customer data reveals different value traits that help to assess each individual. Then we can develop programs to extract revenue from that data.

While “transactional” value has been a mainstay for decades, the web and its social media platforms have introduced new “relationship” and “influence” measures. The more comprehensive data complements CRM’s traditional indicators:

Transactional: Determines a consumer’s monetary value based on purchase recency, frequency and dollar amount. Database marketers have relied on these attributes for decades.

Relationship: Predicated on information sharing activity, the type and depth of information shared by consumers is directly related to their value to the brand.

Influence: Evaluates the consumer’s social potential as an “earned media partner” based on their publishing frequency and social graph responsiveness.

The seamless integration of what we call the “Value TRInity” — transaction, relationship and influence — will be the future of CRM.

Some marketers are already combining aspects of the Value Trinity. Quirky outdoor outfitter Moosejaw not only encourages its customers and fans to interact with the company via Facebook and Twitter, but they’ve also created communications programs and established a rewards program that ties an individual’s transactional activity to his social web activity.

Some travel and hospitality players are ahead of the curve as well. Several hotels have been inviting guests or offering upgrades on rooms based on their high Klout scores, and therefore their increased ability to influence others. Similarly, PR agencies have been forging relationships with key influencers via blogger outreach programs.

These programs can no longer be practiced in silos — firms need to integrate social media, PR, customer service and loyalty programs in order to benefit from the Value TRInity.

Earlier this year, American Airlines launched a Facebook page and quickly grew its audience from 2,600 likes to over 200,000 in fewer than three days. Moreover, the AA Mystery Miles promotion secured visitors’ AAdvantage numbers, enabling it to evaluate participants’ transaction, relationship and influence measures.

As the practice of CRM evolves alongside the social web, it’s critical that we not only think in terms of measurable data, but also about the integration of social behavior to provide a true and accurate reflection of valuable customers. Success will be defined not by chasing influencers, high-volume buyers or friends-of-friends, but by leveraging the Value TRInity to forge enduring, mutually beneficial relationships with your brand’s true friends.

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